sprinting

There are an almost unlimited number of drills for speed training. If you think about this, it makes sense. At the highest levels, track and field coaching often has to focus on the minutiae of athlete movements and many of these drills help to perfect an aspect of the skill. In addition, with the proliferation of sports performance facilities there is a need to attract paying clients via marketing and these drills help to sell services. While there isn’t...

I have taken some heat about speed and sports posts. The crux of these posts is that we have to stop thinking of training hundred meter sprinters when we are training athletes to run fast. While the techniques and training modes of hundred meter sprinters work great for them, focusing solely on these can ignore the needs of athletes. With that in mind, today’s post is going to look at baseball – specifically the offensive side of baseball and...

We’ve made a perfectly understandable mistake with speed training. That mistake is to attempt to train everyone like track and field athletes. We use the same terms, try the same running mechanics, and take the same programming approaches. Here’s the problem, only in the sport of track and field do we compete like track and field athletes. Every other sport has its own unique needs. In today’s blog we’re going to talk about speed training and basketball. Let’s start...

Speed is critical to sports performance. One of the side effects of the systematic incorporation of strength and conditioning into sports is that athletes are becoming bigger, stronger and they are a lot faster than they used to be. This means that if we have prospective athletes, speed training is something they are going to have to incorporate into their programs. Nowadays, lifting weights and practicing the sport are not enough! In a previous post ( http://www.cissik.com/blog/2017/10/speed-running-fast-is-a-skill/ ), we...

You have to practice running fast to get better at running fast. Variations of this statement are some of my favorite social media posts, it’s amazing how often people need to hear this. In this article I’m going to cover some of the more popular exercises that “replace” sprinting and talk about why I feel we have to keep them in perspective. First, a few things to keep in mind. Running fast is a skill. There are techniques, rhythms,...